Darling Pol

by Mary Wesley

  fn3 Hugh Dalton, Old Etonian socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Attlee government. His budgets were designed to fund the welfare state by redistributing wealth. He raised higher rates of tax and death duties and strengthened exchange controls.

  fn4 Nancy Gow, Eric’s secretary at BEA, was one of the few people capable of standing up to Phyllis. When Phyllis suggested that ‘no little boy in Cairo had been safe there during the war’ due to Eric’s presence, Nancy commented that this seemed ‘implausible’.

  fn5 Corinne Luchaire, French film star of the 1930s once hailed as ‘the new Garbo’. She was the daughter of Jean Luchaire, Vichy government apologist and minister who was executed for treason in 1946. Corinne was sentenced to ten years’ ‘national indignity’ four months later. During the occupation she had been a prominent member of the Parisian beau monde surrounding the German ambassador, Otto Abetz, and had a child with a German officer. Le Déserteur was made in 1939.

  fn6 Dr Eric Strauss, prominent psychiatrist, who was treating Phyllis; author of Sexual Disorders in the Male. He also treated Graham Greene.

  fn7 Mrs Littleton – the Littletons were their tenants at Peakswater.

  fn8 Among those who did not share the judgement of Eric and the cellist were William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams, both of whom appreciated the professional talent of ‘la Cohen’.

  fn9 Carol was supporting both Roger and Toby, and paying Mary an annual allowance.

  fn10 Evelyn Waugh had stayed at the Easton Court Hotel in 1944, writing Brideshead Revisited. Eric and Waugh had been on hostile terms since their days together at Oxford.

  fn11 Probably Lewis Baumer, Punch caricaturist and portrait painter.

  fn12 This is a reference to the popular belief that hot baths rendered the male less fertile.

  fn13 Phyllis had tracked Eric down to Easton Court and was renewing her persecution by telephone and letter.

  fn14 A Chagford resident. Eric had a habit of falling out with his rustic neighbours.

  fn15 Richmond Stopford, wealthy bachelor and wartime officer in MI6, had been dining with Mary at the Ritz on the evening she first met Eric.

  fn16 Edwin Rutherford, Eric’s laid-back divorce solicitor.

  fn17 Owners of the Sunday Times.

  fn18 On the last page of this letter below the signature Eric has made cryptic notes in which he refers to ‘Occupation forces … police … code name … Vocke … Czech … + Cz./id. Papers … I disagreed with regime … Unusual witness! cp US secret service? … Brought report of 2 days. Paid 4/500 crowns plus marks.’

  fn19 Ricardo Siepmann, a Hamburg businessman and Eric’s cousin.

  fn20 Gustav Grundgens was perhaps the greatest German actor of the twentieth century. His career prospered throughout the Nazi years.

  fn21 Neighbours in Cornwall.

  fn22 The couple intending to buy Peakswater.

  fn23 The expectation was that Germany would become a united democratic national unit in 1949. When the arrangement eventually broke down in October, the British, French and American zones of occupied Germany became ‘West Germany’ – the Federal Republic of Germany, while the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic.

  fn24 Eric assumed that Phyllis would have noticed his byline, unleashed her next assault and been rebuffed. His first two assumptions were correct, his last optimistic.

  fn25 With Eric once more employed, Mary had told Carol that she no longer needed his allowance of £150 a year.

  fn26 Christopher Fry’s verse play Venus Observed had opened in the West End, directed by Laurence Olivier, with Olivier in the leading role. Denholm Elliott and Rachel Kempson were also in the cast.

  fn27 Eric and Orwell had both been in Spain during the Civil War, and George Orwell had died on 21 January.

  Part 3

  fn1 It was entirely typical of Eric that he should ring his brother at the Bank of England, and ask him to pay for the call, just when Harry was trying to place him in a responsible position.

  fn2 Portals was based in Hampshire. Its customers included the Bank of England but overseas sales were critical for the company’s growth.

  fn3 Eric ‘liked’ the chairman, Sir Francis Portal Bt, an exact contemporary of his at Winchester. The ‘toughs’ in question included General Lord Ismay, Viscount Monck and J. V. Sheffield. Eric overlooks the fact that he too had been ‘introduced by nepotism’.

  fn4 Harry Siepmann had set his heart on becoming governor of the Bank of England. His intellect and independence of mind made him a strong candidate for the position. But in 1949 the deputy governor, Cameron Cobbold, later Lord Cobbold KG, an Old Etonian ‘lifer’ at the Bank, was appointed instead. The anecdote about the Budapest nightclub was cruel since it suggested to Harry that his brother Eric’s notoriety, and Eric’s close relationship with the rakish Peter Rodd, would have counted against him.

  fn5 A director of Portals.

  fn6 Mary’s first novel for children, Speaking Terms, about animals that spoke to each other, was eventually published in 1969.

  fn7 Sister of Christina, Mary’s lodger at Donne Place.

  fn8 Major Hughes, owner of the Beverley Court Hotel in Chagford, a potential witness in Eric’s second divorce case.

  fn9 Food rationing was still in force and Mary needed Eric’s ration book to supply the necessary coupons for the family larder.

  fn10 The ‘old Shylock’ was George Gordon, their new expensive divorce solicitor, who had written pointing out that the £500 they had repeatedly promised to pay remained outstanding. ‘We have done and are doing everything possible for your protection and the preparation of your case … As you know, with your approval I retained Mr Geoffrey Lawrence KC, to fight your battle at the hearing.’ The delay was due to a late payment of an inheritance to Mary by Leest, her family solicitor. Rutherford was the amiable solicitor who had failed in Eric’s first divorce case.

  fn11 Among the letters was one from Jean Cassou, dated 26 January: he thanked Eric for writing to him after his ‘too brief’ visit on his way to Yugoslavia and for keeping him in touch with ‘ce grave et passionnant problème’. He added that he hoped they could renew the cordial dialogue they had maintained since Toulouse – ‘dialogue de deux hommes libres et de bonne volonté, et, si vous me permettez de partager ce titre, de deux gentlemen!’

  fn12 Eric was going to see Sir William Mabane, a director of the group that owned the Sunday Times and a former boyfriend of his sister, Edith. This was in order to dissuade Ian Fleming from giving evidence against him in his divorce case.

  fn13 Konni Zilliacus, left-wing Labour MP who spoke nine languages and published a biography of Tito, Tito of Yugoslavia.

  fn14 Milovan Djilas, Yugoslav dissident Communist and onetime heir to President Tito.

  fn15 Frances Stevenson, secretary and mistress of David Lloyd George, later his second wife.

  fn16 Commissioner Berteaux of Toulouse had failed to support Eric in 1945 when Eric fell out with the Foreign Office.

  fn17 Robert Boothby and Peter Quennell had agreed to act as witnesses against Phyllis in Eric’s second divorce case.

  fn18 Lieutenant General Ali Razmara, the appointed prime minister of Persia, was shot dead while attending a mosque in Tehran. Contrary to Eric’s hopes, the assassin was a Shiite fundamentalist.

  fn19 Ann Glass had been recruited by MI5, aged 18, at the same time as Mary, in 1940. She stayed on after the war as an intelligence officer. A brilliant linguist, with a sexy, deep bass voice, she became an expert in Soviet counter-intelligence.

  fn20 Michael, later Sir Michael, ‘Jumbo’ Hanley rose to become Director-General of MI5 from 1972 to 1978. In 1952 he was a member of ‘E’ Branch – responsible for colonial subversion. He was D-G at the time of the ‘Spycatcher’ fiasco, when a group of MI5 officers became convinced that the prime minister, Harold Wilson, was a KGB agent.

  fn21 Subsequently head of MI5’s Soviet counter-intelligence section. Young was a friend of Anthony (later Sir Anthony) Blu
nt, and – hindered by alcoholism – conducted several ineffectual interrogations of Blunt and investigations into his contacts with fellow Soviet agents Burgess and Philby.

  fn22 The firm of De La Rue were direct rivals to Portals.

  fn23 Dr Karl Blessing, a director of the Reichsbank who was dismissed by the Nazis in 1939. In 1958 he was appointed president of the Deutsche Bundesbank.

  fn24 Dr Hjalmar Schacht was a Nazi supporter who was president of the Reichsbank until he was dismissed in 1939 for opposing German rearmament. In 1944 he was sent to Dachau concentration camp. In 1945 he was tried for war crimes at Nuremberg and acquitted but subsequently convicted and imprisoned on lesser charges. He was an old friend of Harry Siepmann’s. Following the lead of the British High Commission, none of the British community in Germany wanted to have any contact with him.

  fn25 Felix Greene, first cousin of Graham Greene, left-wing idealist, Buddhist and pacifist, worked for Charles Siepmann in the pre-war BBC Radio Talks Department, and spent the war years in California.

  fn26 Elena Lindeman, of Mexican-German descent, married Felix Greene in California in 1945.

  fn27 Sir John Keswick, taipan of Jardine Matheson and friend of Zhou Enlai, married to Clare Elwes, daughter of the tenor Gervase Elwes. Shortly afterwards the Keswicks were put under house arrest in Peking.

  fn28 Marion Grafin von Dönhoff, one of an aristocratic family of East Prussian landowners, was a journalist and a member of the wartime anti-Nazi resistance. She had been the political editor of Die Zeit since its foundation in Hamburg in 1946; she later became its editor-in-chief.

  fn29 Salem College, founded by Kurt Hahn.

  fn30 Kurt Schumacher, leader of the Social Democratic Party and of the West German Parliamentary Opposition, had died in August 1952. He had spent ten years in a Nazi concentration camp and once described Communists as ‘Nazis painted red’.

  fn31 Eric Warburg, prominent member of the German-Jewish banking family who settled in the United States before the Second World War.

  fn32 Michael or ‘Michel’ Thomas was a successful businessman and language teacher. He once wrote a book claiming that he had escaped from the Treblinka concentration camp following which he had arrested 2,500 German war criminals. The Los Angeles Times eventually exposed these bogus claims.

  fn33 Otto John was the head of the BFV, the West German secret service. In 1944 he had been involved in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. When the plot failed he escaped to London but his brother, also in the plot, was executed. Otto John assisted Allied prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and acted as an interpreter during the trial of Field Marshall Erich von Manstein. In 1954 he defected to East Germany. He reappeared in West Germany in 1955, claiming to have been kidnapped by the KGB. He was nonetheless tried and convicted of treason.

  fn34 Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Wehrmacht commander on the Eastern Front in 1941 and 1942, was tried in Hamburg in 1949 and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment for war crimes.

  fn35 Mohammad Mosaddeq was the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. He introduced a programme of social reform and nationalised the Iranian oil industry which had formerly been under the control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP). His government was overthrown by a coup d’état organised by the CIA and MI6 in 1953.

  fn36 Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, British High Commissioner for Germany.

  fn37 Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, 1920–44, personal friend of both Harry and Eric Siepmann.

  fn38 Today’s equivalent would be over £300,000.

  fn39 Prisoner of Grace; Joyce Cary had been a pupil of Eric’s father, Otto, at Clifton.

  fn40 The De Havilland Comet, the world’s first commercial jet airliner, had entered service with BOAC the previous May. In May 1953, the first in a series of unexplained fatal Comet crashes occurred. After some time it was discovered that the aircraft had broken up during flight. These accidents were eventually attributed to structural failure caused by metal fatigue – which would have been accelerated by vibrations.

  fn41 Susan Asquith, daughter of Arthur Asquith, third son of the prime minister H.H. Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith.

  fn42 Brig. Gen. Arthur Asquith, D.S.O. and 2 Bars, was not in fact awarded the V.C.

  fn43 Evelyn Basil Boothby, at the time British Consul in Rangoon.

  fn44 Mohamed Naguib became president of Egypt in June 1953 following the military coup that overthrew King Farouk. He was deposed by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in November 1954.

  fn45 Adib Shishakli, the military dictator of Syria, had been overthrown by a Communistled military coup shortly before Eric’s arrival in Beirut.

  fn1 Nat Micklem CH was a theologian and a Liberal Party politician who became president of Mansfield College, Oxford.

  fn2 The Wonnacotts’ farm surrounded Thornworthy House. Mrs Wonnacott and Mary became firm friends.

  fn3 50p – today’s value £20.

  fn4 An old lady who lived with her sister in Thornworthy Cottage, nearby. She owned the Thornworthy estate, including the farm.

  fn5 Dr Eric Strauss, who had formerly treated Phyllis.

  fn6 see Note on p. 211.

  fn7 Martin Dibelius, an iconoclastic Lutheran professor of theology at Heidelberg University, had died in 1947. Martin Niemoller was an anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor who survived Dachau and became a pacifist and nuclear disarmer.

  fn8 Douglas Woodruff, author, publisher, dominant Catholic journalist and wit, editor of the Tablet for over thirty years, one of the many friends Eric had in common with his enemy, Evelyn Waugh.

  fn9 Thora Bernsdorf, a cousin of Hugo Bernsdorf, with whom Mary had stayed during her visit to northern Germany in 1952. Thora lived on a family estate, Wötersen, in Prussia, adjoining the new border with East Germany.

  fn10 Odd-job man at Thornworthy; no relation to Major Glyn Hughes, proprietor of the Chagford Hotel, and later, briefly, Eric’s landlord in London.

  fn11 Lady Waller, sister of Mary’s landlady, who had previously occupied the house.

  fn12 Father Mangan’s briskly empirical approach to the ‘technicality of unmarriage’ stands in sharp contrast to the clanking public debate on the subject within the Catholic Church today.

  fn13 Gabbitas Thring was an educational employment agency. Eric was planning to tutor pupils at Thornworthy when his summer relief work at The Times came to an end. Richard Livingstone, like Maurice Bowra, was an eminent Oxford don. An old Wykehamist, classicist and president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he had been Eric’s tutor at Corpus.

  fn14 A play by Jean Anouilh translated and adapted by Fry in 1955.

  fn15 John Platts-Mills QC had been a friend of Mary’s and a great influence over her before the war. His son, Joe, was also at Bryanston.

  fn16 Thornworthy was within audible distance of the siren used by Dartmoor Prison when prisoners escaped. Mary used to leave the house unlocked with a cold meal on the kitchen table and a change of clothes on the washing line.

  fn17 Biene was the daughter of Dr Hjalmar Schacht.

  fn18 Church of Our Lady, St John’s Wood.

  fn19 Alwen Hughes, Glyn’s daughter, married her ‘British’ fiancé Rolf Harris in March 1958.

  fn20 An acquaintance, and resident at Easton Court.

  fn21 Betty Paynter, who had been ruined by her second marriage to a dishonest solicitor called Paul Hill, was forced to sell Boskenna in March 1957 to pay off her husband’s debts.

  fn22 Ted Kavanagh was a celebrated radio scriptwriter. He died in September 1958.

  fn23 The Prince and the Showgirl, a romantic comedy starring Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, had just been released.

  fn24 Harman Grisewood, Catholic actor, prominent radio broadcaster and novelist.

  fn25 Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, primate of Poland and leader of national opposition to brutal Communist rule, released from 3 years’ imprisonment and house arrest in October 1956.

  fn26 Editor of Punc
h at the time.

  fn27 Davenport was a close friend of Dylan Thomas and a prominent literary journalist and critic. He weighed nineteen stone and was very proud of his physical strength.

  fn28 Gwenda David, influential publishers’ scout and reader, translator, friend of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Rebecca West, etc. Married Eric Mosbacher, translator, lived in Hampstead where she entertained.

  fn29 The Week was a political newsletter edited and written by Claud Cockburn in the 1930’s. (See footnote on p. 108.)

  fn30 A requiem Mass was not usually authorised in cases of suicide. Mary is blaming the suicide of Davenport’s wife on the circle of friends revolving round the actor Robert Newton. They included Betty Paynter, and Pauline Gates, who had originally introduced Eric and Mary.

  fn31 After selling Boskenna, Betty Paynter moved to a small flat in Penzance – it was infested with mice, which she used to feed by hand. She separated from Paul Hill and took up with a much younger man who was an antiques dealer. The antiques dealer was subsequently shot dead by Paul Hill. Hill was tried for murder and acquitted by a Bodmin jury. He committed suicide in 1985.

  fn32 Sonya Paynter, who was sent home from Thornworthy in disgrace at the age 16, later became very close to Mary who looked on her as an adopted daughter.

  fn33 Billy, aged three, had been sent to Penzance to spend the summer with Alice Grenfell, wartime nanny to Roger, Toby and Sonya.

  fn34 Benita Hume’s nickname for Eric’s older brothers, Harry and Charles.

  fn35 Sir William Haley, editor of The Times, contributed a column to his own paper under the name ‘Oliver Edwards’.

  fn36 Gwenda David later became a friend of Mary’s. Eric’s failure to cultivate an influential alliance meant that he missed yet another opportunity to develop his writing talent.

  fn37 A colleague at The Times.

  fn38 After falling out with Lord Reith, Charles Siepmann had emigrated to the United States where he had married and enjoyed a successful business career.

  fn39 In the 1950s most London gentlemen’s clubs did not admit ladies, but some had a dining annexe. Eric hoped to give his brother and sister-in-law the impression that the Authors’ Club had a much grander dining room elsewhere.